Dark mode is an important feature on smart phones nowadays. In addition to making the phone screen less glaring in the dark environment, power saving is also a major advantage. However, the prerequisite for the power saving effect of turning on the dark mode is that the material of the mobile phone screen must be OLED.
So, if the LCD turns on the dark mode, can it bring about power saving effects? For this reason, a foreign blogger used iPhone 12 and iPhone 11 to conduct a series of comparative tests on the dark mode of the mobile phone.
For OLED and LCD, we should already be familiar with their characteristics. Here the iPhone 12 uses an OLED screen, while the iPhone 11 is an LCD screen. In terms of battery capacity, the iPhone 11 has a 3110mAh battery, while the iPhone 12 has a 2815mAh battery.
Let’s start the test. The first round is a one-hour talk test. The battery keeps the screen on at 100%. It should be noted that the entire test also added the iPhone 12 to open the day mode for comparison.
One hour later, the iPhone 11 with dark mode has 97% of the battery left, while the iPhone 12 has the same battery in the day and dark mode, which is 98%. This shows that in this round of testing, the dark mode has an impact on battery life. Basically no effect.
The second round is a one-hour texting test. After the end of this round, the iPhone 12 with day mode and the iPhone 11 with dark mode are left with 88% power, while the iPhone 12 with dark mode is left with 91% power. In this round, the iPhone 12 equipped with an OLED screen began to show a slight advantage.
The third round is a one-hour mail browsing test. In this round, the iPhone 12 with daytime mode on continues to be the same as the iPhone 11 with dark mode on, with 80% of the battery remaining. The dark mode of the iPhone 12 further widened the gap, leaving 86% of the battery.
The fourth round is a one-hour web browsing test. It should be noted that not all web pages here are adapted to the dark mode, and some web pages are still displayed in black on a white background.
So the final result is that the iPhone 11 with dark mode is left with 70% power, and the iPhone 12 with dark mode is left with 77% power. Compared with the remaining power in the previous round, turning on the dark mode in this round has almost no impact on battery life.
The fifth round is a one-hour social media test. The result is that the iPhone 12 with dark mode has 70% of the remaining power, which consumes 7% of the power. The iPhone 11 with dark mode has the remaining 60% power and consumes 10% of the power, and the iPhone 12 with day mode has the remaining 62% and 9% of the power.
From this we can also infer that the power consumption of the iPhone 11 with dark mode turned on is basically the same as that of the iPhone 12 with dark mode turned on. From another perspective, that is, the dark mode of a mobile phone equipped with an LCD screen cannot achieve the purpose of power saving.
The test continues. After 16 hours of standby, one hour of video, one hour of gaming, and 55 minutes of simulated navigation, the iPhone 12 with dark mode has 24% of battery power, and the iPhone 11 with dark mode has 11% of battery power. The iPhone 12 with daytime mode has 15% of power remaining.
Finally, there is a one-hour music playback test. When the dark mode is turned on, the iPhone 11 has run out of power before the countdown is 12 minutes, while the day mode iPhone 12 has 4% power, and the dark mode iPhone 12 has 13% power.
From this series of tests, we can already see that the dark mode of the mobile phone equipped with LCD screen does not have the ability to extend battery life, and it is not much different from turning on the day mode.
And this result seems to tell us that if you often use dark mode and want to get the effect of extending battery life, then it is best to consider a smartphone equipped with an OLED screen.